Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to computer-based applications, and more particularly to techniques for presenting features of such applications in user interfaces.
In general, an Application Development Framework (ADF) simplifies development of applications by providing re-usable components and integrated development environments, which application developers can use to define user interfaces and application logic by, for example, selecting components to perform desired tasks and defining the appearance, behavior, and interactions of the selected components. Because of the need for flexibility to support many different usage scenarios, the components may work well in certain commonly-used or relatively simple configurations, but not as well in less-common configurations. For example, components that support execution of tasks in business processes may have a requirement that the tasks execute on the same server computer. Although a workaround may be possible to allow some of the tasks to execute on a different server, the workaround may involve relatively complex and time-consuming customization of the task component configurations by the application developer, e.g., by specifying particular metadata values for each task, and/or adding additional components to the application to support execution of the tasks on different servers, thereby partially defeating the ease-of-use features of the integrated development environment. Unfortunately, there is typically no way for developers to use certain components in applications without performing detailed configurations of those components, adding additional support components, and/or implementing program code or logic to achieve desired behavior of such components.